From the article: Moving to the Fediverse This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon.
This is the best most comprehensive article written on this subject. And there is a link to every other article. As usual EFF does their homework and applies their judgement to describe perfectly:
The heart of this fight is for what Reddit’s CEO calls their “valuable corpus of data,” i.e. the user-made content on the company’s servers, and for who gets live off this digital commons. While Reddit provides essential infrastructural support, these community developers and moderators make the site worth visiting, and any worthwhile content is the fruit of their volunteer labor. It’s this labor and worker solidarity which gives users unique leverage over the platform, in contrast to past backlash to other platforms.
EFF doesn’t miss. Those guys gals and folks inbetween all rule. Fighting the good fight ✊
I’ll soon need to back on some of my optional subscriptions, but the yearly donation to EFF is staying for sure
EFF is sometimes on HumbleBundle and people can give to them while getting something too.
Lemmy, Mastodon and Kbin are the future of social media.
I completely agree with this and I think it’s because of the legal issues it avoids. I’m not a lawyer, but if I’m not mistaken, the entire fediverse doesn’t take a hit if a single server is a bad actor. Whereas sites like Reddit and Twitter need to defend themselves based on the content users generate.
Capitalism is destroying the internet
Just the Internet, huh? I think it’s ruining a few things. Especially when it’s coupled w/ the forever growth mentality.
Oh for sure. It’s destroying society in large swaths.
hello healthcare
Infinite growth is the philosophy of cancer
It is but the FOSS community and projects like the Fediverse and increasing decentralization will go a long way to countering monetisation and the capitalist mindset
But it’s social network, not capital network!
This, I did not know:
Details about Reddit’s API-specific costs were not shared, but it is worth noting that an API request is commonly no more burdensome to a server than an HTML request, i.e. visiting or scraping a web page. Having an API just makes it easier for developers to maintain their automated requests.
Yeah, there’s nothing special about an API. It’s just a shortcut for the app to use to get specific info from the server.
Even worse, their official app uses the same API – and, by estimates, the Reddit app uses more calls than Apollo does.
They wanted more per user than they will ever make. A multiple of that, in fact.
Yep. This is Huffman having a tantrum because he found out someone is making enough money to live on with their coding, and his company isn’t getting a slice.
RES is used by some significant percentage of Redditors and they take donations to fund their work. I’m willing to bet they’re next on the chopping block of his tantrum.
To some extent, Reddit does get a slice - in the form of user engagement. User engagement is how they generate ad impressions, even if it’s not from the users on the third party apps.
They COULD have simply put ads into the API, or made it a requirement. They didn’t.
Their entire goal is to maximize “value” before their IPO. Control and number inflation. They don’t care about the long term. Spez wants to cash out, and he doesn’t care what it costs the company.
They COULD have simply put ads into the API, or made it a requirement. They didn’t.
OH, THIS THIS A BILLION TIMES THIS.
They shot themselves in the foot and are now angry about it.
Fortunately something like RES doesn’t need Reddit’s blessing to exist. A browser extension that rearranges information the browser has already downloaded (to massively oversimplify what RES is doing) doesn’t need API access.
They could shut down old reddit but the only reason RES doesn’t support new reddit is that it would require rewriting the whole thing. If that was the only option, someone would eventually do it.
RES is hanging onto life with its fingernails - it’s been in maintenance mode for the past 18 months or so with only 2 people actively working on it (at its peak in 2015ish, I think this was closer to 30).
By their own admission, they wouldn’t be able to survive any major breaking changes.
Scraping is more burdensome for the platform since that serves up images, JavaScript, and other files required to render a page. Maybe dying I tools can avoid this.
In general it’s actually less burdensome.
Significantly so! An HTTP request probably means loading separate JS, CSS, and HTML documents. To say nothing of the weight of the requested page alone.
Greedy bastards
Sadly, Reddit has likely won the short-term battle. But hopefully, this Blackout raises awareness of the need for alternatives. Whether it be Lemmy/Kbin, some up-and-coming site like Squabbles or Tildes, or something not yet created, the seeds of migration off Reddit have been planted. If Reddit has such apathy for its communities pre-IPO, just imagine how bad it will be post-IPO when they are dealing with Wallstreet directly.
Reddit is only going to get worst over the next year. I came across this article a couple days ago while searching for early news coverage of the (then planned) blackout:
Reddit launches new ad products to boost conversions (archive.ph mirror)
Reddit has launched Contextual Keyword Targeting and Product Ads, to help advertisers reach new and valuable audiences.
The article reads like an ad, but what I got out of it was Reddit is going to have more tracking and intrusive advertising. Not a good experience.
Hey there! I’m a human, not an ad. Hello fellow human! I see you’re interested in [contextual keyword targeting]. I think you might be {emotion4} to learn about this related thing, [ad for jesus]!
This’ll be reddit by the end of the year.
Yeah a lot of naysayers had me convinced a short protest would do nothing, but you’re right… This is about awareness. I’ve noticed particularly in the last year a downgrade in quality content on reddit and im sure others are noticing. Lemmy might not be ready yet, but it can be with some building inertia and useability improvements.
If they think people will left reddit in droves and reddit will shutdown during the blackout, yeah they are wrong. The blackout is about awareness, and during this short 48 hours, we already discovered swathes upon swathes of reddit alternatives, some are bigger than other, some are livelier than other, all within their communities yet federating each other, far from whateverthefuck spez is doing. And for that, the blackout is successful.
Lemmy or Kbin might be small, but hey, at least we can quite certain that we are human contributors, not bots.
Just to be the devil’s advocate here. What if Reddit joined the fediverse, what’s stopping them from opening their doors to the increasing fediverse users and use their ads-machine on fediverse?
any fediverse instance can block them
Interesting questions… well they would have to pick a protocol(s) and implement them. They would have to comply with the mechanics and the licenses.
For example here is the ActivityPub rec. Given how non interested reddit seems to be in developing… anything… that is not directly $$$-oriented it’s hard to imagine them doing all this. But if they for some reason decided to make a take over of the fediverse and put their back into it? It would be a totally different reddit and I can’t imagine it.
How and why did Reddit think copying Twitter’s API pricing mistake was a good idea? And why charge Apollo $20 million?!
Like that’s just a cricket bat to the face.
Part of me thinks they were planning on using the high rate as a negotiation tactic. Ask for twice what you want, then back down to your actual number.
Then the Apollo dev “miscommunication” happened and things got ugly. Maybe they’ll still back down, but maybe they’ll die on that hill.
The other part of me thinks they just want to kill 3p apps and this is the easiest way to do that. Just price them out. They probably had some accountant or MBA crunch numbers on how many people would leave vs how much more revenue driving people to their ad ridden hellscape of an app…and figured it was worth the bad press.
Hell, they probably saw what Netflix just did with account sharing and were like “they got more subscribers!!!”.
I think we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Reddit. It will be slow at first then all at once.
They’re betting that the masses are too baked in to care. Reddit’s CEO said it himself, they’re counting on this to blow over. The best message you can send to them is to delete your reddit account and in the box that asks why you’re doing so, tell them you’re leaving for lemmy. Encourage your communities to follow you. This has happened one before with us old-timers who remember the Great Digg Migration. (Interesting internet history read if you have time.)
Probably analyzed the Twitter population before and after the API change, and it seems Twitter survived, so they wish to replicate this.
Avarice and a will to control.
Because their intent is to force people to use their native applications. They’re intentionally making it difficult/impossible for third party apps to exist. They’re wagering that their clout surpasses the bad-will they’ll get for the crummy move.
Then they can bombard everyone with “he gets you” ads or whatever the most recent ad garbage is, and get their full revenue.
The high pricetag provides the failed venere ‘if every user paid the fair cost of X monthly, you can use our api’ in an attempt to limit said bad-will from the community.
Maybe there will be more people arriving because of the shoutout.
“go to war” is a bit extreme, my one small subreddit I set to private, then left as the sole moderator and signed out of reddit. that is not war that is just leaving
